Abstract
Campaign-style environmental implementation (CEI) is widely exerted in environmental protection, while its benefits and costs are controversial. We take advantage of the Central Environmental Protection Inspection (CEPI) System-a latest and distinguished form of CEI launched by China in 2016, as a quasi-natural experiment, to compare the benefits and costs of CEI based on water pollution effect estimates. Our results based on the annual panel data from 500 cities during 2009-2018 show that CEPI significantly reduced water pollution by an average of 20.7%. Further cost-benefit analysis based on the estimates of water pollution reduction shows that the potential health benefits of mortality and morbidity reduction resulting from CEPI are at least $12.26 billion, without bearing additional economic costs. We also explore why CEPI is cost-effective and find that CEPI reduces water pollution and becomes cost-effective mainly through deterring local officials, punishing polluting enterprises, and increasing public participation in environmental governance.
Highlights
Campaign-style environmental implementation (CEI), a particular type of policy enforcement incorporating high concentrated mobilization of governmental resources under political sponsorship to realize a specific pollution reduction goal in a limited time (Liu et al, 2015), has emerged as one of the most widespread and long-lasting strategies of environmental protection in China
There is a conflict of interest between the central government—the policymaker, and the local governments—the policy implementers, in environmental governance targets (Liu et al, 2016), which leads to a growing phenomenon of weak implementation and lax regulation by local governments in environmental management (Ran, 2013; Yu and Wang, 2013)
As an important means of environmental governance, CEI is always criticized for its high cost
Summary
Campaign-style environmental implementation (CEI), a particular type of policy enforcement incorporating high concentrated mobilization of governmental resources under political sponsorship to realize a specific pollution reduction goal in a limited time (Liu et al, 2015), has emerged as one of the most widespread and long-lasting strategies of environmental protection in China (van der Kamp, 2017). Through these measures, CEI may be effective in improving environmental quality, but it is an extremely costly strategy (Jia and Chen, 2019). By estimating CEI’s impacts on water pollution, we conduct a calculation to compare the benefits and costs of CEI based on water pollution effects estimates. Inspection (CEPI) System promulgated by China in 2016 as a quasi-natural experiment and employ a difference-in-differences (DID) method to empirically quantify the potential health benefits and economic costs of CEI. Our paper relates to the growing discussion on the political economy of environmental regulation by conducting a cost-benefit analysis and showing CEI’s working mechanisms.
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